To recreate the word-of-mouth phenomenon that made them famous, the xx shared their album stream Coexist with a single fan just outside London last week -- days before its official US release.

It was a risky marketing move that set out to test whether the band could replicate their initial viral success with a map that tracked shares with a visualization on the Coexist stream's host site.

Twenty-four hours after the stream was shared with a fan on Facebook, the site crashed from the millions of streams, with the average user spending 2.1 hours on the site.

The "superfan" was chosen on the basis of frequent postings about the band "the xx" in the past. This meant he or she was certain to be fired up by the prospect of exclusive access to the new album ahead of everyone else. That in its turn increased the likelihood the initial post revealing the location of the stream to the rest of world would be positive. It would also come with the implicit authority of someone who was presumably well-known in the music community for writing about the band, adding to its impact.

Alongside the massive interest this approach generated, the other big benefit for the band is that it avoids the uncertainties of releasing the album first to music journalists, who are much more unpredictable in their reactions. Indeed, it was only the next day that the music press got hold of the story, by which time the huge viral success of this campaign meant that there was no question of ignoring the new album or its enthusiastic uptake. In other words, the traditional news outlets found themselves forced to acquiesce in the narrative generated by the fans, rather than being in control and telling those fans what to think.

Clearly, this isn't a strategy that can be used too often, and there's also the issue of how good this kind of connection is at generating sales. But it does underlie the importance of fully understanding the social structure of the community of fans -- in this case, in order to find a superfan who could be used to seed the rest of the fan base via an enthusiastic recommendation. There are many other possible ways of involving people who are key "nodes" in the social graph -- the ones whose influence really counts -- and we'll doubtless be hearing about them in due course.

from the what's-the-problem-here dept

It appears that some (certainly not all) in the mainstream press still seems to have problems understanding the value of getting people to talk about what they reported on. They seem to come at this viewpoint from the old line of thinking that a reporter reported on the story and that was it. The story was done. But that's not the way the news works. A news story is simply a part of the conversation. It may be a starting point in a bigger effort -- which is why it's important for so many people today to be able to spread and share the news with others. Yet, if you come at things from a viewpoint of the newspaper article being a final and definitive word, then suddenly such sharing and spreading is viewed as "theft" or being "ripped off" and the person promoting and discussing and sharing your work is suddenly a parasite.

Over the weekend, just such a situation cropped up, when Ian Shapira, a writer for the Washington Post wrote about how he felt when the blog Gawker wrote about one of his articles. At first, he was thrilled. It was validation. In fact, he called it "one of journalism's biggest coups." He should have stopped there, because he was right.

But after excitedly telling his editor about it, his editor claimed that Ian was "ripped off" by Gawker... and Ian appears to have come around to that view. But was he really? Not at all. The Gawker post links to the Washington Post three separate times. And, even worse, almost all of the article they quoted wasn't actually Shapira's writing at all, but quotes from the person he was profiling -- someone Shapira most certainly did not pay. As we recently discussed, newspaper reporters regularly get free quotes and free insight and free advice from various experts, that they get to use in their articles. And now suddenly it's "stealing" for someone else to quote the same people (with a link -- or three) back to the story? Please.

At some point, more people will come around to realizing that when others are discussing the stories you helped bring forth and linking back to you, it's time to join in the conversation -- not scream and whine about others stealing. That just makes it less likely anyone will ever write about one of your stories again.

This isn't even an issue about fair use, as some are suggesting. It's an issue about common sense. If you have a story, you'd better want it to spread, and what better way to get it to spread than to get more people talking about it wherever they want to talk about it. You can't keep all the discussion at your site, nor should you want to. Doing so only guarantees no one cares about what you have to write.